Review Fallout: New Vegas - Contrarian Corner

[SolipsisticUrge]

Who wants to lobby for this guy to write a review of Enemy Unknown?

 

[Mister Arkham]

Who wants to lobby for this guy to write a review of Enemy Unknown?

Who wants to lobby for this guy (and all game journalists?) to be laid off and/or set on fire?

/vitriol

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I also wonder if he found NV overwhelming and dark, what he would think of Fallout 1.

"I'm afraid I cannot write a review as it took me 10 hours to figure out how to get past the rat, before I got lost in the cave. Pass."

 

[Ruprekt]

It's history as a series of straight lines whose rate of ascension can be manipulated

Prosper, can you help with this one?

 

[grotsnik]

It's history as a series of straight lines whose rate of ascension can be manipulated

Prosper, can you help with this one?

Doe not call up That which you cannot put downe.

 

[Brother None]

He also wrote this one, on civ 5:

lulz "it's history"

Nothing says amusing quite like a dumb person trying to be intellectual.

 

[bhlaab]

Enemies all have a health bar the same size, though the rate it will be depleted by your various weapons depends on myriad factors, most of which are folded into sub-menus.

Does this guy actually think that because the health bars are all the same physical size that every creature has the same amount of health?

 

[poocolator]

What it lacks is the emotional purpose and irresolvable conflict that cinema, like every emotionally-oriented form that preceded it, leave lingering in my brain. Civ V is the plot of the Godfather, not the dark final moment where Diane Keaton stands in the door of Michael's office and sees him, surrounded by articulate cretins, looking at her like a stranger. It's the atmospheric science behind the tornado that destroys the town of Xenia, not the gorging anarchy of Bunny Boy kissing Chloe Sevigny in an above-ground pool in the overcast ruins. It's a dictionary to interpret the invented foreign tongue in The Silence rather than an encapsulation of the alien mystery of a boy in a cavernous hotel with no way to understand the terrifying artefacts that surround him.

It's a game without cinema, a logical skeleton without blood and flesh to give it human shape or empathy. It's history as a series of straight lines whose rate of ascension can be manipulated, but it leaves out the most interesting parts of irrationality and human failing. It's more a game and less a video game, one that could have existed as easily 1000 years ago as today. That can't be said of cinema, and the degree to which it resists enhancing itself with cinema's emotional agency reveals how aging and purposeless the mechanical system has become. Consider it a cultural defeat.

What the hell did I just read?
If I wanted to feel hot air on my face I'd go provoke nomask or somebody into an argument. When I want to hear retards' opinions on games, I read IGN. This guy should keep his shit locked away in a file on his PC, so as not to embarrass himself.

 

[Morkar Left]

Does IGN pay for the articles?

 

[Shannow]

Does Fallout: New Vegas have too many stats and numbers and shit? Imagine you were a potato-for-brains video game journalist and had to answer this question truthfully.

Strange, I read: "This UI is fucking atrocious. It's worse than NWN2's camera. (Why not use the original FO's UI, which while far from perfect stand heads, shoulders and Empire State Building above the shit that NV dares call an UI?)"
While VoD reads: "Nothing wrong with the UI or anything else in the game but I am stupid."

 

[Jaesun]

SO basically, another dumbfuck Professional Journalist™ writes an article slamming NV that has the SAME FUNCTIONALITY as fallout 3 (like the ammo), and it's now suddenly bad because Obsidian designed it?

Putting the IGN in IGNorance.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

While VoD reads: "Nothing wrong with the UI or anything else in the game but I am stupid."

Thanks for telling me what I read. You need info? I never never played Fallout 3 nor NV so I don't know jack shit about the UI. Or *anything else in the game*. But I made the newspost anyway!

 

[Decado]

Some of you are fucking dumbasses. I can't stand retards who comment on an article after just reading the excerpt. Read the whole fucking thing, then comment. Either that or shut the fuck up.

Overall the guy is full of hot air and upset that he didn't get to be a film critic for the NYT. His review is fairly positive, however. He writes like a film critic -- the deconstruction of the work is more important than some numerical score that doesn't mean jack shit anyways. If you actually read what the guy wrote (and yeah, his high-brow complaints that things are "too complicated!!" is just that -- high brow snobbery) he is pretty fulsome with his praise for the game's overall narrative structure. He just doesn't like some of the mechanics.

Not saying I agree with the guy, but at least I read the article. Jesus.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

He writes like a film critic

A film critic reviewing a video game.

 

[Hegel]

Not enough R00fles!.

 

[Trash]

Fallout New Vegas got a good review but then got bombed in the letter pages of a mayor magazine here. Someone wrote an angry letter about Bug Vegas and the staff heartily endorsed it, saying that FNV was as buggy as all the obsidian games and that they should've tested it better.

I haven't seen that many bugs and am genuinly puzzled by this. Do you lot have a lot of problems with 'features' in the game?

 

[Hegel]

Fallout New Vegas got a good review but then got bombed in the letter pages of a mayor magazine here. Someone wrote an angry letter about Bug Vegas and the staff heartily endorsed it, saying that FNV was as buggy as all the obsidian games and that they should've tested it better.

I haven't seen that many bugs and am genuinly puzzled by this. Do you lot have a lot of problems with 'features' in the game?

No, they are just being fags.

 

[Decado]

He writes like a film critic

A film critic reviewing a video game.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that style, per se. In fact, it's almost necessary if people want video games to be taken seriously as an art form.

However, I don't like how this guy does it. Also, starting the review with "Well I've never played Fallout before HURRRFFFF!!" was probably a bad idea.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Most bugs I've experienced are bugs that are in fact still present in the fully patched Fallout 3, with random crashes and lockups happening here and there, so yeah, they're just being a bunch of fags.

Btw, according to Steam New Vegas is expecting a huge patch soon.

 

[Decado]

My Fallout 3 experience was pretty non-buggy. In fact, I can't think of a single CTD or other technical issue that I had, though I'm sure there were/are some quest bugs I encountered. All in all it was a remarkably stable game.

 

[The Ninth Circle]

Does Fallout: New Vegas have too many stats and numbers and shit? Imagine you were a potato-for-brains video game journalist and had to answer this question truthfully.

Strange, I read: "This UI is fucking atrocious. It's worse than NWN2's camera. (Why not use the original FO's UI, which while far from perfect stand heads, shoulders and Empire State Building above the shit that NV dares call an UI?)"
While VoD reads: "Nothing wrong with the UI or anything else in the game but I am stupid."

The clunky UI, other than the wait in large battles, is Fallout's worst aspect.

 

[The Ninth Circle]

Fallout New Vegas got a good review but then got bombed in the letter pages of a mayor magazine here. Someone wrote an angry letter about Bug Vegas and the staff heartily endorsed it, saying that FNV was as buggy as all the obsidian games and that they should've tested it better.

I haven't seen that many bugs and am genuinly puzzled by this. Do you lot have a lot of problems with 'features' in the game?

I've had one bug. The Strips main gate suddenly locked itself during the final quest lines. PC users get to use console commands to fix things though

It has more to do with the small percentage of people having issues being so vocal about it. I wouldn't put it past shitty overclocks and poor PC management for a good bit of the issues, not to say the engine or game is stable but every game that comes out gets blasted by idiots that don't know what stable overclocks are. The vast majority that are having a good time with it are too busy to go out and say it.

 

[Trash]

Cool and as expected. I was on the fence about writing a letter to a fucking magazine but what the heck.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

My Fallout 3 experience was pretty non-buggy. In fact, I can't think of a single CTD or other technical issue that I had, though I'm sure there were/are some quest bugs I encountered. All in all it was a remarkably stable game.

Oh it is, and the crashes/lockdowns are pretty far and between. For me personally the game just started to behave badly when I installed the DLC. Mothership Zeta in particular seem pretty bugged, but I don't know.

I've no complaints other than that for either game, really.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

He writes like a film critic

A film critic reviewing a video game.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that style, per se. In fact, it's almost necessary if people want video games to be taken seriously as an art form.

hahahaohwow.jpg


Anyways, in the interest of greater rage I'll post some excerpts from this article on ME2. It's very filmcritic-ly, and surely a step in the road to get games accepted as an art form:

At the end of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking lamented the distance that's grown between modern science and art. Over the last century, science became a theoretical cloud in which all of the old laws are linked to the mysterious chaos of sub-atomic particles and cosmology, written in a language that might as well be hieroglyphics. Art can't provide any answers to these murky questions, but it can account for what the eventual answers would mean to us. Mass Effect 2 is a brave and deluded attempt to bridge the gap between science and art. The end result is a beautiful catastrophe, a stolid combination of RPG abstraction with the occasional heat of interpersonal exchange.


Mass Effect 2 is an interactive plunge into the mystery surrounding dark energy, among the most vexingly unknown quantities in modern science. Its name refers to a technology that can harness this invisible energy to make possible space travel and empower sensitive life forms with biotics. While our future selves will be able to manipulate dark energy, its origin will remain a mystery. Or rather, a conspiracy. In the tradition of human paranoia and death anxiety, BioWare has created a version of the galaxy where ancient life forms use this dark energy to regularly siphon precious life force from everyone else, and then retreat into the dark corners of space. It's like a legion of space devils have decided to spend eternity playing evolutionary whack-a-mole.

. To fully appreciate the complex personas of all your squad members you'll need a rich understanding of the worlds and species that affect them. I would argue this is a wholly unnecessary, a relic of writing which only bogs down games. Books are, by nature, an information-poor medium. Complex emotions, ideas, and characters are hard to communicate directly in writing, so books tend towards figurative language that evokes, makes metaphors, and spins interwoven yarns that mirror the complexities an author might want to capture.

Film contains an order of magnitude more information than writing. It carries music, image, color, shadow, performance, inflection, and human expression on top of the words written in the script. In a few seconds of film, the longing of a character can be instantly communicated in a way that would take Hemingway five pages to fully lay out.]Games arrive next in the evolutionary daisy chain bearing even more information than film.